Read Online Sleeping Beauty by Ross MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

wall. He carried a rifle with atelescopic sight, and before I guessed his intention he was beside the car and pointing it at my head.
    I froze, half out of the car. The fear of death thrilled through me. I said carefully:
    “Put it down, Mr. Lennox. Don’t you recognize me?”
    He glared along the barrel for an instant. He didn’t seem to care who I was. Then he raised the gun so that it was no longer pointed at me. I straightened up.
    Cold fear and anger boiled up in my head like liquid air. I wanted to take the rifle out of his hands and throw it cartwheeling over his house, far out over the cliff, into the sea.
    His sister felt the violent possibility of the scene. She hurried around the car and came between us, speaking to him in a voice that adults use on children.
    “Give me that, Jack. You don’t need it. Mr. Archer came here to help you.”
    “I don’t want his bloody help.” His voice was thick with alcohol and passion.
    “Come on, Jack. Straighten up now. I know you’re under bad strain but the rifle just makes it worse.”
    He was holding it pointed approximately at the moon, which floated low like a target balloon. The woman reached for the gun. They wrestled for a second, more with their wills than their muscles. Her will won. She lifted the gun away from him, and he let her.
    Without it he looked strangely empty-handed. He was one of those men who need a gun to complete themselves.
    The three of us moved awkwardly to the house.
    Marian Lennox was waiting just inside the front door, as if she had been afraid to come out.
    “I told you it was Elizabeth,” she said to her husband.
    Her voice was monotonous and her movements limp, as if her nerves had been strained too far and gone slack. But she took the rifle from her sister-in-law and stood it in a corner of the hallway. Jack Lennox scowled at the two women, and turned the same face on me:
    “You had no right to come here. You’ll ruin everything.”
    He was full of grief and anger, and spoiling for a fight. I wasn’t. I said: “Your sister asked me to come. I think it was a good idea. People shouldn’t try to handle these things by themselves.”
    “We’re doing all right,” he said without conviction.
    “Have you had a second call yet from the kidnappers?”
    “No.”
    “Exactly what was said in the first call?”
    He looked at me with suspicion. “What do you want to know for?”
    “I’d like to get some idea of who we’re dealing with—whether they’re amateur or pro—”
    “You’re not doing the dealing. We are.”
    “I understand that. I’m not trying to interfere.”
    “Of course you’re trying to interfere. You walked into my house uninvited and unwanted. You don’t give a damn about us, or about what happens to my daughter.”
    “I do, though. That’s why I’m here.”
    He shook his head. “You’re spying for Tom Russo, aren’t you? How do I know he isn’t involved in this? And maybe you are, too, for all I know.”
    He had worked himself up into another rage and was letting it talk for him. I didn’t know how seriously to take him. The gun was still resting upright in the corner. The two women were standing, as if by design, between the gun and him.
    It seemed to me that I had already spent a long time in the hallway with Jack Lennox and his sister and his wife and his bloody gun. It was an ugly cold dark room without any furniture, like a holding cell for prisoners waiting for paroles that never came.
    His wife approached him with one hand stretched out. She was pale and enormous-eyed and awkward in her movements, as if she had been in solitary for years. Her hand paused in the air before it touched him.
    “You mustn’t get so excited, Jack. You said that yourself. We’ve got to keep a clear head or the family will never get through this alive. He’s liable to phone now any time.”
    “Has he threatened to kill your daughter?” I said, unwisely.
    Lennox turned on me with clenched fists. His wife took